What to Make of Renteria

When the Tigers traded two of their top four prospects in Jair Jurrjens and Gorkys Hernandez for Edgar Renteria this past offseason, they had to have set high expectations for the Colombian shortstop. After all, in each of the last three seasons he has increased his batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, and OPS. Suffice it to say, close to the 100-games mark, he has not come close to meeting them.

In 82 games he has produced a .254/.301/.326 slash line, “good” for a .627 OPS. He has walked much less, doing so in 6.7% of his plate appearances compared to the 8.1-9.4% of the three years prior. In addition he is not only hitting less but when he does they are not normally of the extra-bases variety. He has just five doubles and five home runs. Add in his lone triple and he has 11 extra-base hits on the season. Of players with at least 300 plate appearances, that ranks as the second worst in baseball, ahead of nobody other than Gregor Blanco.

Now, just because he has performed this way to date does not mean he will continue to do so over the course of the season. Projection systems base their judgments on actual historical data, so they do not just come from thin air. Renteria’s Marcel projection for this year included a .295/.357/.425 slash line, a .782 OPS, 10 home runs, and 29 doubles. He is clearly off pace but how much so? How has his performance so far this year effected what should be expected of him?

Luckily, Sal Baxamusa of The Hardball Times created a spreadsheet that allows us to project performance in-season based on current statistics as well as those from the past three seasons. Using this, Renteria’s projection over the remainder of the season includes a .282/.342/.402 slash line, a .744 OPS, 5 home runs, and 13 doubles. His projected OPS in the second half comes relatively close to his pre-season projection, but what happens when we add back in his poor first half?

With the aforementioned second half, Renteria would finish this year at .267/.320/.360, a .680 OPS, 10 home runs, and 18 doubles. His OPS would be 100 points lower than his pre-season projection, and the only number he matched would be the 10 gopher balls. Quite simply, a .680 OPS from a shortstop expected to be a key ingredient on a team “that could score 1,000 runs this year” is terrible. Add in that he only had one year left on his contract—and a 2009 club option—entering this season and that the Tigers traded away two key prospects, and, while it is yet to be determined how the Braves will make out with Jurrjens and Hernandez, the Tigers end of this deal does not appear it will work out the way they hoped.

Of course, hindsight is always 20/20, and Renteria could be an outlier defying his projection, but he would have to recover from a hamstring injury to post some extra-gaudy numbers for this to happen.